Description:

MICHELLE MURPHY: History, University of Toronto

TITLE "Dying, Not Dying, and Not Being Born: Experimental Exuberance in Bangladesh"

Description: How has life been governed and altered for the sake of improving the macro-economy of the nation? This paper describes the rise of infrastructures of postcolonial experimentality in Bangladesh as a key development in the larger history of the economization of life. In the history of the economization of life, "economy" and "population" are two crucial social science objects of intervention that were mobilized to recompose governmentality in many postcolonial nations around the world in the 1960s throug 1980s, including Bangladesh. The paper argues that Bangladesh was a globally important site for the production of innovative techniques that made up the late twentieth century economization of life. Experiments were not confined to the lab, the clinic, or the field site, but became the very form of a new kind of governmentality. Concentrating on the proliferation of family planning projects and the Matlab field site, the paper traces the biopolitical/necropolitical trilogy of dying, not dying, and not being born that was built into infrastructures of postcolonial experimentality. In so doing, it queries the historical emergence of widespread technoscientific techniques for differentially valuing life in conditions of precarity.

Bio: Michelle Murphy is a historian of the recent past and feminist technoscience studies scholar whose researches examines reproductive and environmental politics. She is the author of Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty (2006), Seizing the Means of Reproduction (2012) and the forthcoming Economization of Life, all published with Duke University Press. She is co-organizer (with Natasha Myers) of the Toronto Technoscience Salon and Director of the Technoscience Research Unit, as well as Professor in History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto.

**co-sponsored by the Department of History

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